Standardizing wounds: Alexis Carrel and the scientific management of life in the First World War

摘要

This essay analyses the development of the Carrel-Dakin treatment for infected wounds during the First World War to explore the relationship between industrialized warfare and experimental medicine, the politics of standardization, and the relationship between the theories and practices of physiology and scientific management. It first describes the intellectual and institutional context from which Alexis Carrel's wound research emerged: experimental medicine and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Next the story moves to the experimental laboratory hospital on the Western Front and the quantification of wounds. Then it considers the propaganda and training campaign in support of the method at the War Demonstration Hospital located on the institute's New York City campus. The de-skilling inherent in the standardization of surgical practice was a response to the incompetence of inexperienced military surgeons, but also an attempt to restructure the medical profession into a hierarchical organization capable of being administered by elite scientist–physicians. Underlying the narrative is the paradox of simultaneous segregation of the biological and the social through laboratory practices and their conflation through the organic analogy.